Okay, so we’re all up to speed with the (ahem) ‘vinyl revival’ but rising like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes is the good ol’ cassette….in fact so much so that in recent years Kanye West, Eminem and even Justin Bieber (yikes!) have made limited cassette runs available….here’s a pic of the Kanye tape but whatever your thoughts on brand Kanye it’s a pretty weird development that this redundant music format should be making any kind of comeback no?
Would you buy music on cassette? Have you got a tape player to play it on? Are there any benefits to the humble cassette or is this just retro-fetishism?
Shameless plug alert – here at eil.com we occasionally get cassettes, here’s a link to what we currently have in stock..so what are you waiting for C-30 – C-60 – C-90 Go! That’s what I say…..
Even when commercially recorded cassettes were popular, I would not buy them. I would buy a vinyl record and record it to cassette on my Pioneer CT-F1000 tape deck with Dolby encoding which would produce a cassette which was better sounding than the commercially recorded cassette. I could then play it in my car cassette deck. And, if anything happened to the cassette, I could always make another.
Same here Anthony. I hardly ever purchased cassettes. They did serious damage to vinyl sales from 1983 onwards. Yet some of the same people who champion vinyl now (Born Again Vinyl Junkies – as opposed to those us who never stopped buying the format) are now fetishing cassettes (and calling CDs “evil”)
I actually collect cassettes. Not for the audio “quality”, although the last run of commercial cassettes, starting around the 90s they really did sound good.
I’ve been collecting them for about 35 years although I soon limited myself to original pressings (OK, tapes aren’t pressed.. but). Like so many other items that develop collectible desirability, they weren’t valued at the time so most ended up in the trash bins, thus increasing their scarcity. Adding to that with first editions, especialy when prerecorded tapes first became available, very few were released. For instance, I have a Beatles “Revolver” issue from 1968 of which, as near as I can tell, there’s only two surviving copies. Any 1968 Beatles cassette issues are scarce already because they were testing the market, and of course I have all of them.. OK all three of them since only three Beatles titles were issued before July 1968, but when they first were issued in June 1968 , these three titles simply said “Cassette” on the j-card. After a few weeks they reprinted them, now stating “Stereo Cassette” because vinyl was stiill available in both mono and stereo, and the tapes were only issued in stereo, so it neccesitated changing it to “stereo cassette” on the outer liner (j-card).
These original liners are exceedingly scarce since they only were issued for a couple of weeks during the very first test run of the first 25 titles by a variety of artists, including 3 Beatles ones.. Revolver, Rubber Soul, and (I think) Sgt Pepper’s. I have never seen a copy of either the Rubber Soul or Pepper’s with that logo, and my Revolver is the only one I have ever seen. I only know of one other person with that issue, and he published a “Beatles page”, covering Capitol ands Apple issues from 1968 on. The page has long since disappeared, but you might still find it by searching for “cassette tapography”
As you can see, there are plenty of interesting reasons to get involved collecting prerecorded cassettes, and, even though current digital recordings sound much better, the very last decade actually did have good audio, although I prefer my high bitrate audio via audirvana plus, and sometimes vinyl straight to analog system.
Although I haven’t updated my blog with the really rare high quality finds because I was still learning blogging at the time, it’s still an interesting start into cassette collecting…
The link of my first attempt to start a tape blog, is available under “website” bekow.
Cheers
cassette players are far more common than working record players, and dirt cheap comparatively where I am. They have the infrastructure, as everyone seems to have an old stereo. But why would I want a cassette when I have a 50 disk changer and a computer, aka modern home jukebox, full of .wav files. Will they try to bring back 8-track and 4-tracks too?
I take your point, not quite the same making a mix tape on a computer though!
I got rid of most of my cassette albums but I still have around 100 cassette singles include Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers, Oasis, Simple Minds, Depends Mode etc.